Best way to eject drive on Windows 7?

Portable Drives My Passport
1

After I connect the My Passport drive via USB, what’s the best way to eject the drive?

If I right-click the drive in My Computer, I don’t see an eject option. I do for most other things I connect via USB.

So far, I’ve been using a 3rd party app called “USB Safely Remove” to eject the drive.

But I’m wondering if there’s another way. I thought I would find an option to eject the drive from within the WD Discovery software, but I couldn’t.

2

Clock on up arrow of Windows screen at lower right “tray” Find the drive, hover over the icons and click on safely remove hardware. Sometimes this can hang, so just turn off PC and remove drive once PC is off.

3

I don’t see a picture of the drive after I hover in the lower right tray. I see other icons.

Can you take a screen shot?

4

No one needs a screen shot. Have you ever ejected anything from your Win PC? Open the up-arrow in tray, and see the icons in the box that appears. One shows a USB plug. Hover over it and it says safely eject hardware. Click on that. In a moment you will see a list of what you can eject, and hopefully one thing will be your drive listed.

If this does not work for you, turn off PC and once completely off you can unplug the Drive’s cable from PC.

Google for " how to eject a drive from a Win PC" If you never read how it is done, it’s time now.

5

Yes, I’ve ejected things from a Windows PC before. Usually I go to My Computer, right-click on the device, and the eject option is there.

Sometimes, I’ll use the 3rd party app USB Safely Remove, that I have.

What prompted this thread is that for the WD My Passport, I don’t see the option to native option when right-clicking to eject. Therefore the only way I’ve been able to eject is by using the USB Safely Remove app.

That doesn’t feel right to me, to have to use the 3rd party app to eject.

Also, I’m not seeing the USB plug icon in the system tray.

Here is a screen shot of my system tray:

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The green arrow is the USB Safely Remove app. Again, I want to find a native way to eject if possible.

The USB Safely Remove app’s trial license has also expired, and I have to wait 30 seconds before I can see the list of devices. That’s why I’d rather find a native way to eject.

I created this thread because I wasn’t seeing the normal, native way to eject devices. Not because I had never ejected devices before.

Ok, after uninstalling the USB Safely Remove app, I can see the USB plug icon in the system tray now:

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USB Safely Remove must have prevented from showing both the native USB plug icon, and its own green arrow icon.

I had installed USB Safely Remove several years ago for some reason. I had used it occasionally since then, but lately the 30 second timer before being able to use it had been annoying me, so I wanted to find the native way to eject again, and wasn’t seeing the usual way of right-clicking on the device in My Computer.

6

The best (and “native” way) to remove hardware is use the method I told you about. If you cannot find the USB icon in the tray, then something is wrong with Win 7; not the WD drive. I would google for a way to get that feature of Windows working again.